Bush rewrites history, aided by the New York Times

It’s yet another example of reporting that makes no effort at analysis of Bush’s claims. This time, Bush says that an American withdrawal from Iraq would have an effect like that of our withdrawal from Vietnam - a bloodbath resulting in the deaths of millions of people.

…one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’

It took two New York Times reporters to write this nearly stenographic story. They condescended to include two short rebuttal sentences from Ted Kennedy, and two from a World War II veteran who heard Bush - who jumped through hoops to avoid Vietnam - speak at the VFW convention. Aside from some brief notes about the upcoming debate in September and the performance of the Iraqi government, much of the rest of the article consisted of direct quotes or paraphrases from Bush’s speech.

It would have reassured readers if stenographers Jim Rutenberg and David Stout had at least Googled the numbers of war dead in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in an effort to put Bush’s plainly disingenuous and highly arguable assertions into perspective. For instance, estimates of the numbers of Vietnamese killed in 16 years of war range up to 1.1 million soldiers and 4 million civilians; add these figures to about 700,000 Cambodian civilians and 50,000 Laotian civilians killed.

Good reporting would include such statistics, along with challenges to Bush’s claim that “millions” of people died after we left because we left. Yes, we all know about Pol Pot. But we could not stop the Vietnamese from taking over their own country, even with half a million American troops there. Should we - could we - have also invaded and occupied Cambodia? It took the Vietnamese Army to get rid of Pol Pot.

And here we were already responsible for almost 6 million dead people, not to mention 12 million gallons of Agent Orange. Exactly where does our responsiblity end? How is it that a president with Bush’s track record of blatant lying and obfuscation can be left unchallenged by reporters when he claims to know how many more people died because we weren’t in Indochina anymore? Unlike the actual death toll, that claim is utterly unprovable, but these two sorry excuses for journalists let it go, as did their sorry excuses for editors.

Nor would good reporters have let this claim stand alone:

Then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence, and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end. The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

Bullshit. No one argued back then that an American withdrawal would end the killing. That killing would continue for awhile afterwards was self-evident; there were scores to settle, governments to dismantle, armies to conquer. And who exactly, is claiming that the killing in Iraq would stop if we would just leave? I don’t think anyone who reads the news believes that for a second. We know just how vengeful Iraqis are, fueled as they are by religious bigotry, political abuses and tribal honor.

Good reporters would not have let Bush get away with claiming our success in helping install democratic governments in Germany, Japan and South Korea without noting that more than 50 years later we still maintain tens of thousands of heavily armed troops on giant military bases in those countries.

Good reporters would not let Bush simplify into fiction such a complex and dynamic situation as existed in Southeast Asia and now exists in Iraq, nor would they allow a comparison to be drawn between then and now, without finding reputable people to challenge those easily rebuttable assertions. What they did is a textbook example of biased reporting - bias in favor of the source, uncritical parroting, for which the Times is notorious and which made the paper intimately complicit in creating the hell we have in Iraq. As it is, these two reporters - and worse, their editors - let what amounts to a politically motivated pack of lies and unsupported claims stand as journalism with the imprimatur of the New York Times.

It’s as if Rutenberg and Stout saw this cartoon or this one as guidelines, not withering criticism of their pretensions to journalistic craft.

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9 Responses to “Bush rewrites history, aided by the New York Times”

1. 1
   Martin Galle Says:
   

   You are dead wrong. We would have won the war in Vietnam if the same people who are trying to screw up the military in Iraq had kept out of it. When we bombed Hanoi, the North Vietnamese were ready to seek an end to the battle. Their troops consisted of 16 year old kids. But people like you would not allow us to win. Thank God you weren’t there at Dresden. I know, “humanitarian” killing is necessary. You tell me how you kill and call it “humanitarian”. When you are in a war you play to win. I hoppe that you don’t die when the first nuclear weapon is used in the USA. On second thought, rather you than me.
   Martin Galle 2/506th 101st Airborne, Vietnam

   August 22nd, 2007 at 3:32 pm
2. 2
   Joe Says:
   

   Context and guarded doubt are fundamental tools in the reporters’ arsenal.

   Ultimately, it is just sad how much ignorance Bush promotes. He truly raises many aspects of the dark sides of our nature.

   August 22nd, 2007 at 5:07 pm
3. 3
   zinya Says:
   

   Now compare attempted catch-up coverages: The NYT strikes me as trying to ‘cohese’ over its stenographic coverage Wednesday with its version and still sounding as if it’s trying in part to do Bush’s rationalizing for him, while also correcting the record, but the overall effect is one of pulling its punches. The WP’s (well Froomkin’s) piece seems more decidedly focused on correcting the record from Bushistory to “reality-based” history.

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/08/22/BL2007082201461.html?nav=hcmodule

   http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/washington/23history.html?_r=1&ref=washington&oref=slogin

   August 23rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
4. 4
   Montfort Says:
   

   Mr. Galle, if you think that we could have won the Vietnam War you are dreaming. The Vietnamese would never have given up trying to control their own nation. We would have been fighting until this day. Millions more Vietnamese would have been killed, the American death toll by now would have been in the hundreds of thousands, cities destroyed, countryside defoliated, one American-imposed government after another would have come and gone, American soldiers would have been put in the position of committing more and more unconscionably brutal acts, Hanoi could have even officially surrendered, and still the Vietnamese would be fighting. All we would have accomplished by staying in Vietnam was more of the same, only worse.

   You have to come to terms with a hard fact of life: We lost the Vietnam War. That’s it. We lost. Why? Because it was not a good cause. We were not defending our Constitution, but playing a game of world power politics. The American people knew this even if you didn’t. It wasn’t Congress that called a halt to the war; it was the American people, by their votes, who decided enough is enough. All they had to ask was the question that has become the essential one today: What are we fighting for? No answer was good enough.

   August 26th, 2007 at 9:59 am
5. 5
   DallasNE Says:
   

   Pol Pot did not come into power in Cambodia because we withdrew from Vietnam. Pol Pot came into power because we invaded the Parrot’s Beak area of Cambodia and destablized an already weak government.

   We even sided at first with Pol Pot when the Vietnam army invaded and overthrew Pol Pot. It was only later that the killing fields were discovered.

   If the killing fields of Cambodia were a result of our leaving then Vietnam would not have invaded Cambodia to remove Pol Pot. That dog doesn’t hunt.

   August 27th, 2007 at 11:15 am
6. 6
   Jonnan Says:
   

   I find it amazing how many people insist that, if only we had been *more* ruthless, more willing to burn down villages to save them, if we’d just gone nuclear, by God *then* we could have won Vietnam.

   As if it weren’t possible for a more powerful force to screw things up enough early on to make the war unwinnable.

   Jonnan

   August 29th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
7. 7
   Duncan Says:
   

   Martin Galle, it doesn’t really matter whether we could have “won” Vietnam: as with Iraq, we had no valid reason to be there, it was an illegal war of aggression and mass murder by the US against a country that had not attacked us to begin with.

   Joe, some American humorist wrote that the trouble isn’t that people are ignorant — it’s that they know so much that ain’t so. Bush doesn’t “promote ignorance” — he actively spreads disinformation. Like most Presidents, including Clinton. And the US corporate media have always helped; during the Vietnam era, for example. It’s well established that the more you rely on the corporate media, the more misinformed you’ll be. So, a responsible citizen must actively seek out better information.

   DallasNE is a good example of someone who knows so much that ain’t so. “The killing fields” had already been getting media attention in the US when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. The Reagan gang knew exactly who they were supporting when they backed Pol Pot against the Vietnamese (as they knew when they backed Saddam Hussein a couple of years later). The big lie in Bush’s statement is that the “millions” who died in Southeast Asia were mostly killed by the US before we withdrew. The worst consequence was probably in Cambodia, but we’d already killed a million or so before Pol Pot took over, and certainly we would have killed many more if we’d stayed.

   September 2nd, 2007 at 4:36 am
8. 8
   Jimmy Havok Says:
   

   Mr. Gall points out that winning in Vietnam would have been easy. Kill all of the Vietnamese and declare victory. You can’t win if you aren’t willing to leave all of your moral constraints in the gutter, you silly liberals.

   September 8th, 2007 at 8:28 am
9. 9
   Montfort Says:
   

   Those darn moral constraints. They’re so, well, constraining. How’m I spozed to do what I want with all these constraining things around me?

   My dad served as head of G2 (intelligence) for the First Division in Vietnam. Next to a huge map of Vietnam with red pins marking bombing runs, he had a large caricature of himself on the wall - him in a swamp trying to pull a plug and the caption “How am I supposed to drain the swamp when I’m up to my ass in alligators?”

   Darn constraining alligators. Bite you in the ass every time if you let’em.

   September 19th, 2007 at 5:34 am